Autism and prejudice

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That's a very good point. I feel like prejudice keeps coming back to the issue of empathy (and I know empathy is itself a confusing word and I hope I'm using it correctly). I don't mean in regards to autistics, but people in general. People who insist on defending their prejudices seem to be unable to see things from their "victims'" perspective but insist on looking at them through their own clouded lens.

This is why I am not sure NT are as empathetic as people think. There are real limits to it. Anything outside thier percieved norm and thought structure and they suddenly become very unempathetic.

I agree with this. I think NT thinking has a lot of deficits that go unremarked or unnoticed because they're considered normal, and thus not deficits at all. Just baseline.

I'd expect a person w/ an ASD would be more likely to form prejudices that mirror their parents due to exposure or else they could have negative experiences that cause them. Otherwise, I can't see why an aspie/autie would form prejudices.

Well, if the reality is that many people w/ ASDs have prejudices, then logically they have to get them from somewhere. I am not sure it's just from parents or necessarily from negative experiences. Many of the comments in the transgender threads I referenced earlier perfectly mimic wider social attitudes about transgender people while simultaneously being inaccurate and prejudiced.

Now you see, THIS is a total MYTH, at least in the US. Some lower class people STRUGGLE to STAY there! Look at the earlier posts here from blackcat who said her mother once scolded her for "sounding too white". She spoke properly, and her mother wanted her to speak like street or something. Some poor blacks even tried to get a kind of english pidgeon classed as another language. They even called it ebonics!

And who says speaking proper english is white anyway? Some whites speak it VERY poorly, and many whites don't speak it at all. And some blacks speak very well. SURE, some may even have a voice where you couldn't tell that they were black just from their voice. What's wrong with THAT?

10 or so years ago, I was making about average wage. MANY blacks, hispanics, asians, made more than I did. And if I wanted healthcare, I had to pay FULL PRICE! That ALONE was like 1/3 of my income!

And what does transgendered have to do with anything. You can play the part you have for so long, and do as well as anyone else there. Nobody DEMANDS yoou have to get the operations, etc...

Racism? Even with a black president, this is claimed! He was at LEAST the second in the running! I wanted the first one to win!
sexism? We almost had a female vice president at least TWICE, and almost had a female president.
homophobia? Do you realize that, statistically, they are supposed to make TWICE as much as straight people?
transphobia? Like I said, I DON'T understand the problem here.
fatphobia? I am FAT. GRANTED, it isn't NEARLY as obvious as some, but I am. Still, I push the limit of office furniture, etc... I have to say that I understand this.
ableism? OK, I don't even know WHAT you mean here. Do you mean the cases where they say a blind person shouldn't "mind the store"? Well, I once worked at a government office, and the person minding the store WAS blind! INCREDIBLE, but TRUE!

And you think people should make an income for NOTHING!?!?!? WOW! HOW MUCH!?!?!? Maybe I'll quit my job!

You're sidetracking. Look up code switching to see how some people strategically alter how they speak in different social contexts to avoid censure or prejudice.

I would also add that language is a side effect of class, not that language causes class. Your argument about "speaking properly" is completely incoherent and has nothing to do with wanting to stay in one economic class. It's a cultural thing and linked to class, but I do not believe it reflects a desire to remain poor.



I suspect the majority of people in the US make more money than I do on account of the fact that I am unemployed and on meager disability benefits. However, I do have a mild degree of class privilege in that my family can afford to at least provide me with a place to live and food to eat, thus allowing me to avoid starvation and homelessness. However, this too is precarious due to the overall lack of income in the household meaning we're all living on a thin edge with little leeway for more than a few luxuries.

But you see, as a white disabled woman, this is not unusual for me. A black disabled woman may be in worse shape, economically because she is both black and disabled. You are only looking at one set of numbers and not how situations affect those numbers.

And I am pretty sure that black people, Hispanic people, and Asians pay full price for their health care too, if they are in a similar economic situation.



The lack of critical analysis and accurate information in this statement is obvious. The consequences for not transitioning tend to lead to lower quality of life - even impaired functioning in life - as well as comorbid conditions such as depression and anxiety, and a significantly higher suicide rate than the rest of the population. And I don't mean a few percentage points, I mean 42% of transgender people attempt suicide at some point in their lives, and I seem to recall the general population is around 1-2% When you say "nobody demands you have to get the operations," you are correct, in a particular context. What I mean is that most people would suggest not getting the operations, etc, despite the great personal cost to many transgender people when they ignore their needs. Asking a transgender person to not transition is like asking an autistic person to be completely neurotypical.

But the best thing for their mental health, if they need to transition, is to transition. Unfortunately, transitioning brings another level of discrimination to the table. It's unreasonable and inaccurate to suggest that transgender people are at fault for the discrimination they experience after accessing transition. They're not choosing other people's prejudices or reactions, other people are.



Are you seriously suggesting that having a black president means racism is over? The fact that white people are five times richer than black people in the US is somehow rendered meaningless because one man won the election? We can just erase decades - centuries - of economic disparity that are clearly distributed along race lines because Barack Obama is in the White House?



Should I direct you to the recent attempts to redefine rape so as to make it illegal to provide federal funding for some abortions? Or the wage gap, which still exists? Or how women have a harder time getting into certain fields (engineering, mathematics, for two examples) due to hostility against women being in those fields, and women being treated as less capable than men at those fields? How about the recent article in the New York Times which apparently included quotes suggesting that an 11 year old girl was responsible for being gang-raped by 18 year old boys? I'm sorry, but almost having a woman in the Oval Office does not mean sexism is over. It simply means one particular glass ceiling is developing a few cracks.



There are a lot of people in LGBT communities who don't fit into those statistics - queer people of color, queer trans people, queer disabled people. You can pretty much narrow it down to affluent white gay men, and perhaps some affluent lesbians. This number is not representative of the sheer number of queer youth, for example, who are homeless.



Your lack of understanding is perfectly clear. I just don't understand why you parade your lack of understanding in preference to learning what's actually going on? This is, I think, the key to prejudice: Being proud of being ignorant. I do not understand that perspective - to me, ignorance is something to change, not something to cling to.



I don't think you understand what this means. Among many other things, it can mean that fat people are occasionally denied life-saving medical care. Just for one example. Do you really understand that? Or that fat people in general are paid less than thin people?



I mean the negative stereotypes about disabled people, poor treatment of disabled people, discrimination against disabled people. One significant sign of this is how commercial insurance carriers will either charge incredibly high premiums or deny insurance entirely to anyone who has pre-existing conditions. Being diagnosed on the autistic spectrum means being effectively uninsurable. There's also things like the significantly higher sexual abuse of people with developmental disabilities (especially women - 83% of women with a DD are sexually abused at some point in their lives). Significantly lower employment rates despite being able to do the work, work programs that employ disabled people for lower than minimum wage, institutionalization in general which is not typically a positive thing, characterization of people with psychological conditions as violent even though people who have these conditions are on average less likely to commit violence and more likely to be the victim of violence than people who do not have these conditions.



You state this as if what I said is obviously wrong, but I suspect you're not really thinking it through. Do you feel that poverty and homelessness is a good thing? What is your point here?

Well if we needed an Exhibit A, I think it's arrived.

I think we just have our own way of expressing prejudice rather than being less vulnerable to it.

It seems like the people I know of who are AS and prejudiced tend to be more likely to have the sort of prejudice that involves having an incorrect concept of a group and applying that rule to the entire group. So, it's more like, working from an incorrect general principle.

HECK NO, they would LOVE to be rich! Some figure out how to do so. They just don't want to go with society and often don't want to work. You yourself said INCOME should be a RIGHT with no requirement to work.

And proper speech is just easier to understand, doesn't automatically cause prejudice, etc... HECK, If I said "I be going to the store now. I am bought have a loaf of bread and ham a sandwich to make", how far do you think I would get?



Heck, I helped out this one charity, by providing funds and my own time. The family that really did it for me was this large, supposedly poor, family. They WERE black, but even at minimum wage they could easily have taken care of the home, food, and some other things.

It's a pity I didn't determine earlier that it wasn't going to help anyone. All that money I could have put into better use. Living with them a couple days ended up with my catching a cold and nearly having a newsletter I paid for getting thrown out. Heck, my car is now almost like so much junk, maybe I could have driven it to the autoshop if I weren't so busy delivering thanksgiving dinners.

Did you hear about the guy that is even trying to get the US to give ipads and notebook computers to ALL poor people.



Who knows? The people working for UNIONS generally don't.



HECK, I don't exactly have mania now myself. I certainly doon't get everything I want. Even with the money I have, almost all goes to pay old debts, some of which aren't really MINE, and to TRY to maybe not have to rely on others when I am older. A LOT of people get depressed. I don't even know what would really make me happy. Actually, did you notice how you said "Asking A to NOT B is like asking C to be D". Them NOT doing something is FAR easier than my doing something I have tried to my entire life and couldn't.



Well, I certainly know about the discrimination they face accessing transition. Like I said, I wish they didn't have to, and really wish they wouldn't, transition. But you might know how that discussion ended. If not, you can guess. And they surely must know up front how people will feel. Some, like me, just use words, and don't mean any physical harm. I am not condoning any violence.





Well, Oprah did well even on her first day. She kept the job. One person there had an idea for a talk show AND? AND....? Well I don't know about NOW, but she WAS like the highest paid entertainer or something EVER! She has supported some african communities, at least had her own magazine, and now has a TV network. So NO, I am not talking about 1 person. What I am talking about, as one person put in a video on Disney ".......And MORE! All the way up to prez FORTY FOUR!"



Well, I have known some men that weren't well respected, and women that were. And some women won't hire men for such jobs. Sorry, what I have seen just doesn't fit those stats. Frankly, you really have to wonder. Like that aforementioned video, for example, that says blacks invented the light filiment. Gee, then what did edison do? HE worked to find the best filiment he could, and put it in a vacume tube.



OK, NOW you are mixing! That is like saying that some women don't get paid as much and then saying they are blind and deaf.



Like I said...



I've heard of some fat people, like nearly twice my weight or more, where care was delayed, or mediocre, because they weigh SO much, etc... HEY, many things are just not made for HUGE people. On the tv show "house" there was a show where house gets in trouble because they destroyed an MRI machine with a person CLEARLY over the weight limit.

And WHO KNOWS? Maybe I would have gotten a raise if I lost weight. If I lost weight, maybe I wouldn't have had some problems which raised medical costs.



Insurance is a gamble against yourself. The insurance company is only doing what any other investor or casino would do. When the odds are too much against them, they leave and/or kick you out. As for attacking disabled people, etc... there will ALWAYS be perverts. Sad but true. But HEY, you speak of people being depressed, etc.. That stuff probably DOES make them feel better. NO, I am NOT happy about it. I'm just trying to show you how the other side uses your argument. Sexual abuse and abuse of women in general is the same, and they may make the same argument. BTW I haven't abused, hit, etc... EITHER the disabled OR females.

Yeah, I guess I'll ask about that, I know someone who is MR. If you paid him $10, he wouldn't know if it was a dime or a million dollars. Still, if all MR people got paid minimum wage or over, how is that fair for the non MR people?

I am not in sales OR a manager position primarily because of my AS. I ALWAYS knew WHY! It is obvious to me and people that know me, and some employers have even said so, but NOW I have a NAME for it. I COULD have been a manager EASILY making DOUBLE what I am making. But I doubt anyone would hire me for that.

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NO, I DON'T think poverty and homelessness is a good thing. THAT is why I RESENT people treating the US taxpayers like they are an inexhaustible resource that can be bled dry over and over and over again. And why should *I* work if it is more profitable to sit on my rear!?!?!? And if YOU want to argue money or about funds in the US, argue with many members of the last dozen or so congresses.

YOU haven't thought it through. Read that last paragraph a few hundred times, maybe it will sink in.

Last edited by 2ukenkerl on 10 Mar 2011, 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You know, I'm really confused when people claim that women are oppressed. At least in America, we aren't, that I've noticed. What I've noticed is more like the opposite. So... have you guys who are saying it exists actually experienced it or seen it happen?

Another thing I notice is lumping all of these in together like they're the same thing. "Ableism" is a cultural value; racism is one particular manifestation of the general human tendency to hate people who aren't like you (and is not directed solely at black people by white people-- more like every group hates every other group); homophobia and transphobia are moral judgments. Why are you calling them all the same thing as if they're one category?

Yes. I'm not sure what your definition is, but I'm pretty sure men don't ask their male employees for blow jobs, or arrange to have them fired when they refused (and yes, this has happened to me. A personal experience but far from my only or necessarily the worst, but there's plenty of evidence for institutional discrimination - I already described multiple cases in my immediately previous post).



We categorize them differently, obviously. I categorize them as ways in which people stigmatize and institutionally marginalize or even abuse segments of the population on the basis of traits they possess, whether physiological, neurological, social, economic, or anything I've forgotten in that list. While the motivations are different, the real world consequences can tend to shake out very similarly. The arguments in "Derailing for Dummies", for example, are used against transgender people, women, people of color, disabled people, and so on. The scripts are very similar in every case.

I would also argue that every one of these has elements of cultural and moral judgments. I know that the ableism I've experienced has frequently had the sound of moral judgments about how someone who is not "productive" is morally flawed.

I also disagree that racism is simply the way people dislike people who are different (but the other things - being transgender, being gay, lesbian, or another nonheterosexual orientation, having a disability, are also differences, so this isn't really clear cut). Racism has a history - in the case of black people, that history goes back to slavery in the US. It's not just the "natural way people are" but the way our culture has evolved.

Another element that I think you're missing is that there's cultural benefits for being members of some groups but not members of other groups. White people, in general, receive a lot of cultural benefits for being white, while people of color, in general, do not receive any of those cultural benefits. So a black person's dislike for white people does not carry the institutional weight of, say, favorable treatment by the police behind it.

Oh, and the single category I place these things in is "oppression." I do distinguish them in terms of the way that people who fall into one category are considered socially "better" than people who fit into another category. Say abled vs. disabled, white vs. person of color, straight vs. gay, men vs. women. Oppression/Privilege and their interactions with each other (and interactions among multiple privileges/oppressions) is one of my interests.

Last edited by Verdandi on 10 Mar 2011, 10:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

EXACTLY! There is an old saying. I would attribute it, but I forget who said it. If you think you can't, you can't. It would be more appropriate to say "If you think you can't, you probably won't try and would fail.". HECK, being female is sometimes a selling point. The first phone operators were MALE, believe it or not. Probably because nobody considered it an easy job. And, admittedly, the man was supposed to be the bread winner. They determined that females were nicer and were appreciated, so operators suddenly were practically all women.

Women played a big part in winning WWII! The US was practically a PIP SQUEAK! It wasn't very interested in helping outside the US, and was nicely isolated. Well, the US had SO MANY men going to war, and trying to protect the US, that there was a HUGE labor shortage. There was ALSO a raw materials shortage. And the women helped fill both roles. and that broke a LOT of stereotypes. It ALSO built the US to be pretty big and before enemies could even attack, they were already being bombed by US planes, etc.... The women didn't HAVE to do that. They did it for pride, to help out, maybe reunite their families earlier, and a paycheck.

In case anyone brings it up... WHY do women want to be in the military? WHY? They don't treat ANYONE well and the pay isn't all that great. If there is a war, do you REALLY want to go to war? Eventually, it will get to that.

So if I were female, I wouldn't be lamenting it. I would work with what I had. If I were held back in something because I wasn't good at math, for example, I would try to improve, You want to destroy stereotypes? Be an EXAMPLE of how untrue they are.

Blacks are often held up as THE minority. That's the only reason I provide so many examples there. Even the United Negro College Fund often now says it is for minorities. Somehow, I doubt they help asians, hispanics, or white women. White women aren't a minority, but they are treated as one under the law.

Women want to be in the military for all the reasons men do: because we want to serve our country; because it's a job you can get into just for being in reasonable physical shape; because there are opportunities for education, especially if you come from a poor family; because you want to get away from home; because you're interested in the military just like you might be interested in any other job. One woman I know spent some time in the Marines and joined because she likes physical activity and wanted to get tougher.

Personally, I know I would not be a good soldier; but women can still make good soldiers. No, we aren't the same as men; but there's just so much diversity from woman to woman that you really can't predict much based on just knowing somebody's gender, and the military can't predict that a man will be a good soldier any more than they can assume a woman will be a bad one. It's all about being suited for the job, not which chromosomes you have.

Women don't actually have a big disadvantage on math, especially once you remove cues during the test that remind them they aren't "supposed" to be good at it. It's like, 1% or something. Too small to matter.

The differences between men and women are there. They are just overwhelmed by the differences between individual people.

I have NEVER heard any person I ever knew saying that they experienced that. I wouldn't have asked you to do that, or even THOUGHT about it. Like I said, perverts exist. I'm sorry to hear you had to deal with some.



WOW, you included EVERYONE!



If you CAN help out, you SHOULD. NOBODY is claiming that a paraplegic should be a ditchdigger. But HEY, if I were a paraplegic, I could still do MY job.



Actually, the history of the black people goes back to AFRICA where tribes attacked and even enslaved others.



GEE, I was almost SHOT by one police officer. I was almost ARRESTED by another. Luckily I wasn't hispanic. Apparently someone messed up records on my licenseplate, and got it confused. Luckily the other guy was shown as being hispanic. YEP, my being NON mexican helped get me out of that. If I were black, I would also benefit in that way. Still, I had to wait while he sorted things out.

I WISH I could scream racism. MAN I wish I could. But BOTH police officers were WHITE! BTW the first guy stopped me for NO reason. The other apparently somehow saw my tags.

OH YEAH, I was rearended last year AND, I was disorganized for several reasons, it was late, I was tired, and I didn't know if I would survive the night because I appeared to have an injury(From the accident) that, if I did, it would likely have been FATAL! So what did the police officer threaten to do? He threatened to impound my car! REMEMBER, ***I*** was hit, and wanted to leave for the hospital to make sure I was OK. I almost wish that the bill were millions of dollars, so they would pay for the veritable torture I was submitted to. AGAIN, he was WHITE!

And I am supposed to be treated favorably? WHO should I complain to? Do the whites have some special group of lawyers and courts?



So in other words, you blame everything on abled straight white males. YIKES! I never pictured myself as some sort of supervillain. OK, I have some disabilities that aren't really recognized as such. Otherwise, I am just straight, white, and male. And why didn't you mention Christian? USUALLY they mention CHRISTIAN also!

Of course, you DID earlier speak against treatment like this EVEN against straight white males! "I categorize them as ways in which people stigmatize and institutionally marginalize or even abuse segments of the population on the basis of traits they possess, whether physiological, neurological, social, economic, or anything I've forgotten in that list." YEP, that includes straight white able bodied males as shown by the government, the NPR busts yesterday, the democrat party statements, and even your comments on this thread!

Well, there IS a "double standard". 8-/ The women only have to do a little more than half as many pushups. The rest are easier too, but actually closer than I thought they would be. I recently heard that the navy was one of the easiest to get into.




But the idea is SUPPOSED to be that you realize you could leave and go to a war rather quickly.



I WILL give you that. And i wouldn't be a good soldier either.



You're right about that on all counts. And I used math ONLY as an example. There are people on this board that I suspect are better than I might have imagined when I was younger, and are FEMALE! I HAVE known women that were horrible in math, but I STILL remember this person on "are you smarter than a fifth grader", that SHOCKED the kids(Around 10 years old)! The person tried to multiply 2*5! And that person took a LONG TIME! The person was a COLLEGE GRADUATE! The person was a MATH MAJOR! OH YEAH, HE WAS MALE! HOW BAD CAN YOU BE!?!?!?

PLEASE don't think ALL americans are this dumb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNyf7XD4OqQ

This one I just thought was kind of cute, even if a bit cliche.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfxkWIlj ... re=related